![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Two articles
One on a comic book textbook about the Holocaust
No Laughs, No Thrills, and Villains All Too Real
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
BERLIN — The other morning Jens Augner, slight and owlish, a schoolteacher in his 40s, quizzed his eighth-grade class of 13- and 14-year-olds at the Humboldt Gymnasium, a local school. As part of a trial program, he has just introduced a new history textbook into the curriculum: to be exact, a comic book about the Holocaust, called “The Search.”
Among other things, the book shows how far comics have come as a cultural medium taken seriously here, but also that the Holocaust has come a long way too, as a topic to be freshly considered by a new generation of German teenagers.
As it happens, the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, just recently made headlines across Europe and elsewhere when, seemingly out of the blue, he announced that beginning next fall, French fifth graders should each study the life of one of the 11,000 French children killed during the Holocaust. (“Obscene,” responded a dumbstruck Pascal Bruckner, the philosopher. He wasn’t alone in that sentiment.)
On the new comic book’s cover, a teenager named Esther sprints from a truckload of Nazi soldiers. She faces a choice in the book: a policeman will let her flee, if she wants, rather than follow her parents to the camps.
Standing before the blackboard, Mr. Augner asked the students what they might have done in Esther’s place. Hands shot up.
“Her parents would have wanted her to hide,” one girl speculated. A boy pointed out that the policeman, and not only Esther, had to make a difficult decision, because he could have been punished for letting her escape.
Many students said they would have gone after their parents. One declared that she would die for them.
At which point a quiet classmate spoke up: “It’s a question of whether you want to die alone.”
With the Second World War passing from living memory, the Holocaust remains a subject taught as a singular event and obligation here, and Germans still seem to grapple almost eagerly with their own historic guilt and shame. That said, few German schoolchildren today can go home to ask their grandparents, much less their parents, what they did while Hitler was around. The end of the war is now as distant from them in time as the end of the First World War was from the Reagan presidency.
Paradoxically, this seems to have freed young Germans — adolescent ones, anyway — to talk more openly and in new ways about Nazis and the Holocaust. Passing is the shock therapy, with its films of piled corpses, that earlier generations of schoolchildren had to endure.
In the comic Esther recounts to her grandchildren what happened to her family, and in the process facts emerge about Hitler’s rise, about deportations and concentration camps. Without excusing anyone or spreading blame, the story, rather than focusing on Hitler and geopolitics, stresses instances where ordinary individuals — farmers, shopkeepers, soldiers, prison guards, even camp inmates — faced dilemmas, acted selfishly or ambiguously: showed themselves to be human. The medium’s intimacy and immediacy help boil down a vast subject to a few lives that young readers, and old ones too, can grasp.
As for Mr. Sarkozy’s plan, his education minister suggested that instead of having each school child study a specific Holocaust victim, an entire fifth-grade class might study the life of one child so as not to traumatize every 10-year-old in France. A committee is meeting now to study both proposals. Even if uncooked, the president’s original notion about personalizing and revivifying a moral turning point in modern history reflected a broad change afoot.
Ask many Germans now in their 20s, 30s and 40s, and they will describe elementary and high school history classes that virtually cudgeled them into learning about Nazis and the Holocaust. The other morning Jutta Harms recalled her class in a small town in the north of West Germany during the late 1970s. Ms. Harms now works for Reprodukt, a leading Berlin publisher of graphic novels.
“Students had to fight to talk freely about the war,” she recounted, “and, being confronted in class by the emotions of the teachers, there wasn’t any space to feel for ourselves.” The comic book, she went on, is therefore a welcome sign of change.
Mr. Augner, the schoolteacher, echoed Ms. Harms’s recollection: “Teachers with good will used to make German children feel it was somehow their fault, that they had a weight on their shoulders. The war was still a fresh wound.” This new comic book, he added, speaks to “a different generation of students.”
“It teaches the subject,” he continued, ”so that it’s no longer just about victims and perpetrators.”
When a visitor asked Mr. Augner’s students how much they identified with the Germans who fought the war, they looked blank and slightly baffled. “It was another generation,” one said with a shrug. In that response a page of history seemed to turn.
“The result, I find, is that interest in the subject is actually increasing,” Mr. Augner later commented. “These students don’t have the same discomfort we did talking about it.”
Older Germans can recall an American television mini-series, “Holocaust,” that shocked people when it was shown here in the late 1970s and helped transform public opinion, giving many permission to break the long silence about Nazi atrocities. It recounted the war from the perspectives of two families, one Jewish, the other Nazi.
“The Search” takes this approach further, beyond the realm of commercial entertainment and into much subtler territory. The Anna Frank Haus in the Netherlands put it together by joining a team of experts with Eric Heuvel, a Dutch comic artist, whose previous book about the war in the Netherlands was distributed to 200,000 schoolchildren there. Some 20 classrooms, grades 7 to 10, here in Berlin and in North Rhine-Westphalia, are testing the new book. There are versions in Dutch, German, Hungarian, Polish and English.
“It would not have been possible as a history text 10 years ago, when people here assumed comics were only for those who couldn’t read properly,” Ms. Harms, from Reprodukt, the comics publisher, said.
The visual style of “The Search” is clear, simple, pastel-colored, in a classic Belgian-Franco comic tradition. “Less is more,” Mr. Heuvel, the artist, said in a recent telephone conversation, acknowledging that he pilfered liberally from Tintin’s inventor, Hergé. “We spent endless hours making sure that the Nazi costumes were kept to a minimum because boys can glorify these things.”
Thomas Heppener, director of the Anne Frank Center in Berlin, said, “There was also a lot of discussion about color.” Black-and-white, he noted, is now a cliché of art and movies about the Holocaust. Color is less melodramatic. “And you know the trees were still green at Auschwitz,” he added.
It’s a bright autumn day in the book when Esther’s parents are rounded up and sent off to die. The comic is more heartbreaking for being understated and cautious about violence. Ruud van der Rol, one of the writers, explained: “There are no piles of bodies, because we knew from experience that this could block children from dealing with the whole subject. Also — and we had endless conversations about this — we decided not to show Hitler as a beast or inhuman because the Nazis, after all, were human beings. That’s the point. Anyone can be a perpetrator or a hero. The choice is yours.”
The other afternoon Dilek Geyik, a 30-year-old schoolteacher in training, was preparing to introduce the comic to her students at another Berlin high school. The students there come mostly from working-class families, and from time to time tensions flare between immigrants and right-wing teenagers. A petite, dark-haired woman, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, Ms. Geyik is accustomed to answering the question Where are you from? Unlike many of the people who ask, she was born and reared here, a native Berliner. But with a Turkish name, she’s simply presumed to be an outsider by many Germans.
“When I was taught about the Holocaust in high school, I felt I could step away from the topic in ways German students couldn’t, because it wasn’t about me,” she recalled. “History was something they were supposed to bear in silence. But now you don’t have so many witnesses, so the direct connection isn’t there for children. And also I came in time to see it myself in a larger context.”
She added: “More and more young German students do too. They are sensitive to the idea that the subject is not just about Germans and Jews. It’s about people and life.”
An article about the Al Muhamasheen in Yemen
Yemen’s Marginalized Class
By ROBERT F. WORTH
SANA, Yemen — By day, they sweep the streets of the Old City, ragged, dark-skinned men in orange jump suits. By night, they retreat to fetid slums on the edge of town.
They are known as “Al Akhdam” — the servants. Set apart by their African features, they form a kind of hereditary caste at the very bottom of Yemen’s social ladder.
Degrading myths pursue them: they eat their own dead, and their women are all prostitutes. Worst of all, they are reviled as outsiders in their own country, descendants of an Ethiopian army that is said to have crossed the Red Sea to oppress Yemen before the arrival of Islam.
“We are ready to work, but people say we are good for nothing but servants; they will not accept us,” said Ali Izzil Muhammad Obaid, a 20-year-old man who lives in a filthy Akhdam shantytown on the edge of this capital. “So we have no hope.”
In fact, the Akhdam — who prefer to be known as “Al Muhamasheen,” or the marginalized ones — may have been in this southern corner of the Arabian Peninsula for as long as anyone, and their ethnic origins are unclear. Their debased status is a remnant of Yemen’s old social hierarchy, which collapsed after the 1962 revolution struck down the thousand-year-old Imamate.
But where Yemen’s other hereditary social classes, the sayyids and the judges and the sheiks, and even the lower orders like butchers and ironworkers, slowly dissolved, the Akhdam retained their separate position. There are more than a million of them among Yemen’s fast-growing population of 22 million, concentrated in segregated slums in the major cities.
“All the doors are closed to us except sweeping streets and begging,” Mr. Obaid said. “We are surviving, but we are not living.”
The Akhdam have not been offered the kind of affirmative action programs India’s government has used to improve the lot of the Dalits, or untouchables, there. In part, that is because Yemen never had a formal caste system like India’s.
As a result, the Akhdam have languished at the margins of society, suffering a persistent discrimination that flouts the egalitarian maxims of the Yemeni state.
Even the recent waves of immigrants from Ethiopia and Somalia, many of them desperately poor, have fared better than the Akhdam, and do not share their stigma.
The Akhdam who work as street sweepers, for instance, are rarely granted contracts even after decades of work, despite the fact that all Yemeni civil servants are supposed to be granted contracts after six months, said Suha Bashren, a relief official with Oxfam here. They receive no benefits, and almost no time off.
“If any supervisor wants to dismiss them, they can do that,” said Ali Abdullah Saeed Hawdal, who started working as a street sweeper in 1968. “The supervisors use violence against them with no fear of penalties. They treat them as people with no rights.”
The living conditions of the Akhdam are appalling, even by the standards of Yemen, one of the poorest countries in the Arab world.
In one Akhdam shantytown on the edge of Sana, more than 7,000 people live crammed into a stinking warren of low concrete blocks next to a mountain of trash. Young children, many of them barefoot, run through narrow, muddy lanes full of human waste and garbage.
A young woman named Nouria Abdullah stood outside the tiny cubicle — perhaps 6 feet by 8 feet, with a ceiling too low to allow her to stand up — where she lives with her husband and six children. Inside, a thin plastic sheet covered a dirt floor. A small plastic mirror hung on the wall, and a single filthy pillow lay in the corner.
Nearby, a single latrine, in a room approximately 3 feet by 3 feet, serves about 50 people. The residents must carry water in plastic jugs from a tank on the edge of the slum, supplied by a charity group.
Wearing a brown dress, with a rag tied around her head, Ms. Abdullah said she and her family brought in no more than 1,000 Yemeni riyals a week, about $5. She begs for change, while her husband, Muhammad, gathers metal and electrical components from trash heaps and sells them.
Like most people in the shantytown, they have no documents, and they do not know how old they are.
“We are living like animals,” Ms. Abdullah said. “We cook and sleep and live in the same room. We need other shelters.”
When the winter rains come, the houses are flooded, she said. On the cold days in winter, the family burns trash to stay warm.
Richard Bramble, a British doctor who works in a charity-sponsored clinic inside the shantytown, said half of the deaths there over the past year were of children under the age of 5, and one-quarter were in the first month of life.
The death rates from preventable disease are even worse than the nationwide average in Yemen, where overall infant mortality is already an appalling one in nine, and maternal mortality is one in 10. Most of the women among the Akhdam start having children in their early teens, residents said.
Part of the problem, many members of the community say, is that most of the Akhdam have internalized their low status and do not try to better themselves, find real jobs or seek an education. Much of their meager income goes to buying qat, the plant whose leaves many Yemenis chew for its mildly narcotic effects.
“They do not even push their children to become soldiers,” said Muhammad Abdu Ali, the director of the medical clinic in the shantytown and one of the Akhdam. “They have given up on changing their situation.”
In the past two years, members of the Akhdam have begun to organize, creating a political front to lobby the government and seek development aid from charity groups. Earlier this month, hundreds of Akhdam demonstrated in the city of Taiz to protest their mistreatment, and afterward a government supervisor accused of stealing money from Akhdam street sweepers was fired.
But efforts to help the Akhdam have sometimes backfired. International donors have mostly preferred to work through Yemeni mediators, who have often misused or stolen the money intended for the Akhdam, said Rashad al-Khader, a Yemeni lawyer who has been representing the Akhdam for seven years.
The Yemeni government has occasionally built shelters for the Akhdam, but has not provided them documents for those shelters or the land, Mr. Khader said. And it has done little to help them improve their access to health care and education, despite a series of election-year promises to the community, according to Akhdam leaders.
The government does, however, seem embarrassed by the plight of the Akhdam, Mr. Khader said. When the new national political front was formed a few months ago, government officials insisted that its proposed name be changed — removing the term “the marginalized ones” in favor of “those in extreme poverty.”
The popular notion that the Akhdam are descendants of Ethiopian oppressors appears to be a myth, said Hamud al-Awdi, a professor of sociology at Sana University. Most of them have roots in villages in Red Sea coastal plain of Yemen, and many of them may have African origins, he added. Little else about them is clear, despite a number of academic studies.
Some Akhdam have found ways to improve their station. Mr. Hawdal, after working as a street sweeper for 20 years, became a supervisor, and now lives in central Sana with his wife and five children in two rooms that are relatively clean, a world away from the slums at the city’s edge.
As he leaned on a cushion chewing qat, with a television chattering in the background, Mr. Hawdal pointed proudly to a plaque on the wall commemorating his long service as a sweeper. He has sent all of his children to school, unlike most of the Akhdam, and one of them made it as far as ninth grade.
But Mr. Hawdal acknowledged sadly that all of his children had since dropped out. He was running out of money, he said. But that was not the only reason.
“They had no hope of doing anything except street sweeping,” he said.
No Laughs, No Thrills, and Villains All Too Real
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
BERLIN — The other morning Jens Augner, slight and owlish, a schoolteacher in his 40s, quizzed his eighth-grade class of 13- and 14-year-olds at the Humboldt Gymnasium, a local school. As part of a trial program, he has just introduced a new history textbook into the curriculum: to be exact, a comic book about the Holocaust, called “The Search.”
Among other things, the book shows how far comics have come as a cultural medium taken seriously here, but also that the Holocaust has come a long way too, as a topic to be freshly considered by a new generation of German teenagers.
As it happens, the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, just recently made headlines across Europe and elsewhere when, seemingly out of the blue, he announced that beginning next fall, French fifth graders should each study the life of one of the 11,000 French children killed during the Holocaust. (“Obscene,” responded a dumbstruck Pascal Bruckner, the philosopher. He wasn’t alone in that sentiment.)
On the new comic book’s cover, a teenager named Esther sprints from a truckload of Nazi soldiers. She faces a choice in the book: a policeman will let her flee, if she wants, rather than follow her parents to the camps.
Standing before the blackboard, Mr. Augner asked the students what they might have done in Esther’s place. Hands shot up.
“Her parents would have wanted her to hide,” one girl speculated. A boy pointed out that the policeman, and not only Esther, had to make a difficult decision, because he could have been punished for letting her escape.
Many students said they would have gone after their parents. One declared that she would die for them.
At which point a quiet classmate spoke up: “It’s a question of whether you want to die alone.”
With the Second World War passing from living memory, the Holocaust remains a subject taught as a singular event and obligation here, and Germans still seem to grapple almost eagerly with their own historic guilt and shame. That said, few German schoolchildren today can go home to ask their grandparents, much less their parents, what they did while Hitler was around. The end of the war is now as distant from them in time as the end of the First World War was from the Reagan presidency.
Paradoxically, this seems to have freed young Germans — adolescent ones, anyway — to talk more openly and in new ways about Nazis and the Holocaust. Passing is the shock therapy, with its films of piled corpses, that earlier generations of schoolchildren had to endure.
In the comic Esther recounts to her grandchildren what happened to her family, and in the process facts emerge about Hitler’s rise, about deportations and concentration camps. Without excusing anyone or spreading blame, the story, rather than focusing on Hitler and geopolitics, stresses instances where ordinary individuals — farmers, shopkeepers, soldiers, prison guards, even camp inmates — faced dilemmas, acted selfishly or ambiguously: showed themselves to be human. The medium’s intimacy and immediacy help boil down a vast subject to a few lives that young readers, and old ones too, can grasp.
As for Mr. Sarkozy’s plan, his education minister suggested that instead of having each school child study a specific Holocaust victim, an entire fifth-grade class might study the life of one child so as not to traumatize every 10-year-old in France. A committee is meeting now to study both proposals. Even if uncooked, the president’s original notion about personalizing and revivifying a moral turning point in modern history reflected a broad change afoot.
Ask many Germans now in their 20s, 30s and 40s, and they will describe elementary and high school history classes that virtually cudgeled them into learning about Nazis and the Holocaust. The other morning Jutta Harms recalled her class in a small town in the north of West Germany during the late 1970s. Ms. Harms now works for Reprodukt, a leading Berlin publisher of graphic novels.
“Students had to fight to talk freely about the war,” she recounted, “and, being confronted in class by the emotions of the teachers, there wasn’t any space to feel for ourselves.” The comic book, she went on, is therefore a welcome sign of change.
Mr. Augner, the schoolteacher, echoed Ms. Harms’s recollection: “Teachers with good will used to make German children feel it was somehow their fault, that they had a weight on their shoulders. The war was still a fresh wound.” This new comic book, he added, speaks to “a different generation of students.”
“It teaches the subject,” he continued, ”so that it’s no longer just about victims and perpetrators.”
When a visitor asked Mr. Augner’s students how much they identified with the Germans who fought the war, they looked blank and slightly baffled. “It was another generation,” one said with a shrug. In that response a page of history seemed to turn.
“The result, I find, is that interest in the subject is actually increasing,” Mr. Augner later commented. “These students don’t have the same discomfort we did talking about it.”
Older Germans can recall an American television mini-series, “Holocaust,” that shocked people when it was shown here in the late 1970s and helped transform public opinion, giving many permission to break the long silence about Nazi atrocities. It recounted the war from the perspectives of two families, one Jewish, the other Nazi.
“The Search” takes this approach further, beyond the realm of commercial entertainment and into much subtler territory. The Anna Frank Haus in the Netherlands put it together by joining a team of experts with Eric Heuvel, a Dutch comic artist, whose previous book about the war in the Netherlands was distributed to 200,000 schoolchildren there. Some 20 classrooms, grades 7 to 10, here in Berlin and in North Rhine-Westphalia, are testing the new book. There are versions in Dutch, German, Hungarian, Polish and English.
“It would not have been possible as a history text 10 years ago, when people here assumed comics were only for those who couldn’t read properly,” Ms. Harms, from Reprodukt, the comics publisher, said.
The visual style of “The Search” is clear, simple, pastel-colored, in a classic Belgian-Franco comic tradition. “Less is more,” Mr. Heuvel, the artist, said in a recent telephone conversation, acknowledging that he pilfered liberally from Tintin’s inventor, Hergé. “We spent endless hours making sure that the Nazi costumes were kept to a minimum because boys can glorify these things.”
Thomas Heppener, director of the Anne Frank Center in Berlin, said, “There was also a lot of discussion about color.” Black-and-white, he noted, is now a cliché of art and movies about the Holocaust. Color is less melodramatic. “And you know the trees were still green at Auschwitz,” he added.
It’s a bright autumn day in the book when Esther’s parents are rounded up and sent off to die. The comic is more heartbreaking for being understated and cautious about violence. Ruud van der Rol, one of the writers, explained: “There are no piles of bodies, because we knew from experience that this could block children from dealing with the whole subject. Also — and we had endless conversations about this — we decided not to show Hitler as a beast or inhuman because the Nazis, after all, were human beings. That’s the point. Anyone can be a perpetrator or a hero. The choice is yours.”
The other afternoon Dilek Geyik, a 30-year-old schoolteacher in training, was preparing to introduce the comic to her students at another Berlin high school. The students there come mostly from working-class families, and from time to time tensions flare between immigrants and right-wing teenagers. A petite, dark-haired woman, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, Ms. Geyik is accustomed to answering the question Where are you from? Unlike many of the people who ask, she was born and reared here, a native Berliner. But with a Turkish name, she’s simply presumed to be an outsider by many Germans.
“When I was taught about the Holocaust in high school, I felt I could step away from the topic in ways German students couldn’t, because it wasn’t about me,” she recalled. “History was something they were supposed to bear in silence. But now you don’t have so many witnesses, so the direct connection isn’t there for children. And also I came in time to see it myself in a larger context.”
She added: “More and more young German students do too. They are sensitive to the idea that the subject is not just about Germans and Jews. It’s about people and life.”
An article about the Al Muhamasheen in Yemen
Yemen’s Marginalized Class
By ROBERT F. WORTH
SANA, Yemen — By day, they sweep the streets of the Old City, ragged, dark-skinned men in orange jump suits. By night, they retreat to fetid slums on the edge of town.
They are known as “Al Akhdam” — the servants. Set apart by their African features, they form a kind of hereditary caste at the very bottom of Yemen’s social ladder.
Degrading myths pursue them: they eat their own dead, and their women are all prostitutes. Worst of all, they are reviled as outsiders in their own country, descendants of an Ethiopian army that is said to have crossed the Red Sea to oppress Yemen before the arrival of Islam.
“We are ready to work, but people say we are good for nothing but servants; they will not accept us,” said Ali Izzil Muhammad Obaid, a 20-year-old man who lives in a filthy Akhdam shantytown on the edge of this capital. “So we have no hope.”
In fact, the Akhdam — who prefer to be known as “Al Muhamasheen,” or the marginalized ones — may have been in this southern corner of the Arabian Peninsula for as long as anyone, and their ethnic origins are unclear. Their debased status is a remnant of Yemen’s old social hierarchy, which collapsed after the 1962 revolution struck down the thousand-year-old Imamate.
But where Yemen’s other hereditary social classes, the sayyids and the judges and the sheiks, and even the lower orders like butchers and ironworkers, slowly dissolved, the Akhdam retained their separate position. There are more than a million of them among Yemen’s fast-growing population of 22 million, concentrated in segregated slums in the major cities.
“All the doors are closed to us except sweeping streets and begging,” Mr. Obaid said. “We are surviving, but we are not living.”
The Akhdam have not been offered the kind of affirmative action programs India’s government has used to improve the lot of the Dalits, or untouchables, there. In part, that is because Yemen never had a formal caste system like India’s.
As a result, the Akhdam have languished at the margins of society, suffering a persistent discrimination that flouts the egalitarian maxims of the Yemeni state.
Even the recent waves of immigrants from Ethiopia and Somalia, many of them desperately poor, have fared better than the Akhdam, and do not share their stigma.
The Akhdam who work as street sweepers, for instance, are rarely granted contracts even after decades of work, despite the fact that all Yemeni civil servants are supposed to be granted contracts after six months, said Suha Bashren, a relief official with Oxfam here. They receive no benefits, and almost no time off.
“If any supervisor wants to dismiss them, they can do that,” said Ali Abdullah Saeed Hawdal, who started working as a street sweeper in 1968. “The supervisors use violence against them with no fear of penalties. They treat them as people with no rights.”
The living conditions of the Akhdam are appalling, even by the standards of Yemen, one of the poorest countries in the Arab world.
In one Akhdam shantytown on the edge of Sana, more than 7,000 people live crammed into a stinking warren of low concrete blocks next to a mountain of trash. Young children, many of them barefoot, run through narrow, muddy lanes full of human waste and garbage.
A young woman named Nouria Abdullah stood outside the tiny cubicle — perhaps 6 feet by 8 feet, with a ceiling too low to allow her to stand up — where she lives with her husband and six children. Inside, a thin plastic sheet covered a dirt floor. A small plastic mirror hung on the wall, and a single filthy pillow lay in the corner.
Nearby, a single latrine, in a room approximately 3 feet by 3 feet, serves about 50 people. The residents must carry water in plastic jugs from a tank on the edge of the slum, supplied by a charity group.
Wearing a brown dress, with a rag tied around her head, Ms. Abdullah said she and her family brought in no more than 1,000 Yemeni riyals a week, about $5. She begs for change, while her husband, Muhammad, gathers metal and electrical components from trash heaps and sells them.
Like most people in the shantytown, they have no documents, and they do not know how old they are.
“We are living like animals,” Ms. Abdullah said. “We cook and sleep and live in the same room. We need other shelters.”
When the winter rains come, the houses are flooded, she said. On the cold days in winter, the family burns trash to stay warm.
Richard Bramble, a British doctor who works in a charity-sponsored clinic inside the shantytown, said half of the deaths there over the past year were of children under the age of 5, and one-quarter were in the first month of life.
The death rates from preventable disease are even worse than the nationwide average in Yemen, where overall infant mortality is already an appalling one in nine, and maternal mortality is one in 10. Most of the women among the Akhdam start having children in their early teens, residents said.
Part of the problem, many members of the community say, is that most of the Akhdam have internalized their low status and do not try to better themselves, find real jobs or seek an education. Much of their meager income goes to buying qat, the plant whose leaves many Yemenis chew for its mildly narcotic effects.
“They do not even push their children to become soldiers,” said Muhammad Abdu Ali, the director of the medical clinic in the shantytown and one of the Akhdam. “They have given up on changing their situation.”
In the past two years, members of the Akhdam have begun to organize, creating a political front to lobby the government and seek development aid from charity groups. Earlier this month, hundreds of Akhdam demonstrated in the city of Taiz to protest their mistreatment, and afterward a government supervisor accused of stealing money from Akhdam street sweepers was fired.
But efforts to help the Akhdam have sometimes backfired. International donors have mostly preferred to work through Yemeni mediators, who have often misused or stolen the money intended for the Akhdam, said Rashad al-Khader, a Yemeni lawyer who has been representing the Akhdam for seven years.
The Yemeni government has occasionally built shelters for the Akhdam, but has not provided them documents for those shelters or the land, Mr. Khader said. And it has done little to help them improve their access to health care and education, despite a series of election-year promises to the community, according to Akhdam leaders.
The government does, however, seem embarrassed by the plight of the Akhdam, Mr. Khader said. When the new national political front was formed a few months ago, government officials insisted that its proposed name be changed — removing the term “the marginalized ones” in favor of “those in extreme poverty.”
The popular notion that the Akhdam are descendants of Ethiopian oppressors appears to be a myth, said Hamud al-Awdi, a professor of sociology at Sana University. Most of them have roots in villages in Red Sea coastal plain of Yemen, and many of them may have African origins, he added. Little else about them is clear, despite a number of academic studies.
Some Akhdam have found ways to improve their station. Mr. Hawdal, after working as a street sweeper for 20 years, became a supervisor, and now lives in central Sana with his wife and five children in two rooms that are relatively clean, a world away from the slums at the city’s edge.
As he leaned on a cushion chewing qat, with a television chattering in the background, Mr. Hawdal pointed proudly to a plaque on the wall commemorating his long service as a sweeper. He has sent all of his children to school, unlike most of the Akhdam, and one of them made it as far as ninth grade.
But Mr. Hawdal acknowledged sadly that all of his children had since dropped out. He was running out of money, he said. But that was not the only reason.
“They had no hope of doing anything except street sweeping,” he said.